I would have thought something with "wait online" in its
name would
actually wait for it to be on-line. To me, "on-line" means connected
and operational. Starting up but not actually on-line, isn't on-line.
I find it interesting that
freedesktop.org suggests that the entire purpose of
NetworkManager-wait-online is to make sure that remote drives mount
AFTER an IP address has been configured:
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/NetworkTarget/
That's exactly the use case that's broken here.
By the way, my own experiments (on a lab of twenty-five FC26 workstations with
dynamic IP addresses) seem to confirm that removing -s fixes the issue. Increasing
the timeout from 30 to 45 was enough to keep switch NetworkManager-wait-online itself
from timing out due to switch glitchiness.
I agree that the nm-online manpage is confusing. My experiments seem to indicate
that perhaps "active" means the network interface is "up" in the sense
that the
interface is listening for data-link layer (i.e. Ethernet) frames. It doesn't seem
like it means the interface actually has an IP address configured.
Robert Marmorstein